Association between coronary heart disease and risk of advanced liver fibrosis: results of the 2017-2018 national health and nutrition examination survey.

Background: Studies have shown that advanced liver fibrosis is strongly associated with cardiovascular risk factors (including age and smoking status). Nevertheless, the exact mechanism is not yet clear. Hence, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between coronary heart disease (CHD) and advanced liver fibrosis and to reveal the developmental processes.

Methods: In this study, we included 9254 participant data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveydatabases in 2017-2018 to explore the association between risk factors and advanced liver fibrosis. First, the baseline characteristics of the participants were examined using Student's t -test and chi-squared test. Moreover, the association between CHD and advanced liver fibrosis was assessed using logistic regression analysis. Thereafter, the receiver operating characteristic curve was used to further evaluate the diagnostic performance of model 3 for advanced liver fibrosis.

Results: In total, 3624 participants were included in this study after removing samples with missing information. Baseline statistics showed that CHD, age, sex, BMI, alcohol consumption, smoking, diabetes, and physical activity were all remarkably discrepancies between nonadvanced and advanced liver fibrosis groups ( P  < 0.05). Of these, CHD was shown to have a strong association with advanced liver fibrosis (95% confidence interval (CI), 1.84-7.27, P  = 0.0063, odds ratio (OR) = 3.6587). Moreover, the effect of CHD on advanced liver fibrosis was not confounded by other confounders in model 3, in which confounders were corrected. Eventually, with an area under the curve greater than 0.7, the receiver operating characteristic curve confirmed the good diagnostic performance of Model 3 for advanced liver fibrosis.

Conclusion: This study suggested that having CHD was a risk factor for patients with advanced liver fibrosis, which provides a basis for the study of advanced liver fibrosis.